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CALGARY — Privately held BluEarth Renewables Inc. announced Wednesday it has landed the financing it needs to build its 15-megawatt Culliton Creek Hydro Project in B.C. The Calgary-based green power company said it will use about $77 million provided by the National Bank of Canada to build the run-of-river hydroelectric project about 90 kilometres north of Vancouver.

At the Forrest Kerr hydroelectric project in densely forested northwestern B.C., construction crews are putting the final touches on a $725-million plan to begin putting 195 megawatts of clean power on the grid in the next two months. The massive run-of-river project — the largest of three in the area being developed by Calgary-based AltaGas Ltd. at a total cost of $1 billion — is four hours drive north on Highway 37 from Terrace, then 17 kilometres up a winding mining road to the heart of the traditional Tahltan Nation lands.

Enbridge Inc., through an anonymous numbered company, is seeking to build an undisclosed number of hydroelectric projects — many on salmon-bearing rivers and creeks on traditional aboriginal territories — in B.C. and Alberta, The Vancouver Sun has learned. Enbridge says they are part of the company’s green energy plans and are not being built to power pumps for the company’s proposed 1,177-kilometre Northern Gateway pipeline from Alberta to Kitimat.

A numbered company owned by Enbridge, proponent of the Northern Gateway pipeline project, wants to build a major run-of-river power project on the same fish-bearing B.C. river where an earlier such project was rejected on environmental grounds. A report by Canadian Projects Ltd. for 8056587 Canada Inc. — owned by Calgary-based Enbridge — notes that the proposed 120-megawatt Clore River run-of-river project would be located about 60 kilometres southeast of Terrace.

Powerex, the electricity trading subsidiary of BC Hydro will pay $273 million US in cash and offer California electric utilities a credit worth $477 milion US to settle claims against it related to allegations that it helped inflate the California power market during that state's electricity market crisis in 2000/01, the company announced this morning.

Yoho National Park — At the beginning of each month in the winter, Shelley Humphries and Marcel Macullo strap on their backcountry skis and head into a forest along the Trans-Canada Highway near Field, B.C., to measure the snowpack. They plod through the crunchy snow, carrying backpacks and hauling a long metal tube.

OTTAWA — Only two of 1,161 witnesses to appear at B.C. “community hearings” into the Northern Gateway oilsands pipeline project said they support the $6.5-billion megaproject, according to a tally by two environmental groups. The lone supporters of the two 1,170-km pipelines running from Bruderheim, Alta. to Kitimat, were Dennis MacKay, a one-time Liberal MLA, and former Port Hardy mayor Russ Helberg.

Thousands of Metro Vancouver residents are still without power this morning, after a thunderstorm hit the region last night, stranding hundreds of people at the top of Grouse Mountain and sending two men to hospital with minor injuries after they were struck by lightning.

BC Hydro claims a Mission homeowner is ultimately liable for a fire that originated at the base of a smart meter one day after it was installed. A report by the Mission fire department said the blaze, which destroyed Trish Regan’s house in the 7900-block of Burdock Street and leaped to the roof of a neighbouring home on June 15, originated at an insulating “lug” in the lower left corner of the meter base. The report says the terminal, which attached the meter base to the home, appeared cracked and “radiated heat to combust the wall at or near the meter base.”

The magnitude of British Columbia’s energy boom is hard to gauge in a city like Vancouver, where job-growth statistics and billion-dollar announcements can get lost amid the glassy towers and bustle of urban daily life. But in the tiny village of Xa’xtsa, a six-and-a-half-hour drive from Vancouver at the north end of Harrison Lake, the boom has been a total game-changer.

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